Ep. 52’s host frames Obama’s policies—like gun control and Oregon ranchers’ anti-terrorism convictions—as politically motivated attacks on white Americans, mocking racial grievance narratives while citing rising white mortality rates from drugs and suicide. He contrasts BLM protests with the Hammond case, arguing double standards exist, then dismisses systemic racism as a tool of division ("Mel the Force for Evil") before pivoting to Mark Stein’s Broadway Babies Say Goodnight, ending with a call for liberty over identity politics. [Automatically generated summary]
A group of white men with guns have taken over some buildings in Oregon to fight back against the Black Lives Matter movement, or BLM.
In what could be the start of a massive race war, the white gunmen are demanding that BLM release two ranchers from federal prison that...
Oh wait, maybe BLM isn't Black Lives Matter.
Maybe it's the Bureau of Land Management.
Maybe this has nothing whatsoever to do with race at all.
Let's forget the whole thing.
Trigger War.
I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
So it's raining in Southern California.
We have had, I don't want to say we've had a long drought, but there are people standing out on Sunset Boulevard going, water fall from hole in sky, gods must be angry with California.
I mean, we have not seen rain like this in a long, long time.
We're in about three years where there wasn't a cloud in the sky, so this is, I suppose, it's never good.
Nothing is good in California.
If it doesn't rain, all the plants die, and then it rains, it's all the mudslides.
The mudslides will be terrible.
And then it dries up and the forests burn.
And that's just a perpetual.
I mean, if this place weren't paradise, we'd all be running for our lives because it's terrible.
Thank you before I get started for the notes of condolences about my dog.
That was really touching.
I really appreciated it.
She was the best of creatures, and I am truly sad to see her go.
And I really appreciated getting some tweets and some emails.
Grief is a desert that must be crossed on foot.
That is most of what I know about life.
Grief is, there's no fast way through it.
There's no way around it.
You just keep walking and you follow the star and you get to a good place on the other side.
So thank you.
I appreciate that.
In Happier News, today, you didn't know this, but now you will be enlightened.
Today is the release date for the final novel in my young adult trilogy, Mind War.
I have a young adult trilogy of science fiction adventure stories called Mind War.
It's the story of, I haven't been promoting this much because it's the last book in a trilogy.
So I kind of figured, you know, if you're reading it, you already know.
But maybe that's silly of me.
I should probably let you know.
It's a story about a football player, a high school football player named Rick Dial, who gets in a car accident, shatters his legs.
He gets so depressed, he locks himself in his room and just plays video games.
But because he's such a great athlete, he becomes a fantastic video game player.
And the government recruits him for a program to fight back against a terrorist who has piped his mind into the internet in order to invade our security system.
So essentially, they take this kid, Rick Dial, and they inject him into what is a massive video game.
And it takes place both in this weird video game landscape and also in the real world where it has real-world implications.
This is the final novel in the trilogy.
It's called, the first one was Mind War.
The second one was called Hostage Run.
And the third one is called Game Over because the game is never mind.
Why Rick Dial Matters00:15:39
But you can get it anywhere.
You can get it anywhere that excellent books are sold.
And it is a young adult.
It's very clean.
It has, I would say, Christian values, though I wouldn't call it preachy.
And I think it's worth taking a look at if you like adventure stories.
All right.
So we've got this minor contretemp going on in Oregon where these guys, and it's a huge deal on Twitter.
There's this thing, Oregon under attack.
Hashtag Oregon under attack.
It's like 50, we don't know if it's 15 guys.
They say it's 150.
The people who are on this site say it's 15 guys have taken over an empty building.
And for people who have never been in Oregon, people who live in cities, this is in southeastern Oregon, it's empty.
There's nobody there.
This is the biggest county in Oregon.
8,000 people live in this county.
So this is like nobody there.
So meanwhile, at the same time, we're going to get back to that in a minute because it is what I want to talk about today.
Not the actual action, but the kind of thinking that is going into the reactions to what people are doing.
Meantime, Obama, who is the President of the United States, you may recall from our last show, he is coming out with this executive action on gun control, okay?
And I just want to take a moment to appreciate the deep connection this president has with the heart of the American people.
The way he feels, I mean, doesn't he?
He has his finger on the pulse of the mood of America and knows exactly what the right thing to do is to set us all at each other's throats and to raise us to levels of hatred and hostility that we haven't known before.
If he hasn't divided us enough, if he hasn't got black people burning down their own neighborhoods, if he hasn't got, you know, gays and straight people at each other's throats, you know, over legal, the legal implications of the Supreme Court, if he hasn't got all of us like just kind of ready to strangle each other, he comes out today and he's going to have this executive action.
He's going to circumvent Congress because the president has this idea that if Congress doesn't do something, then he gets to do it, that that's the Constitution, that Congress passes a law, and if it doesn't, he gets to pass a law.
So here he comes out.
This is yesterday, I think.
He's explaining his reasoning.
Let's hear it.
I've just received back a report from Attorney General Lynch, Director Coleman, as well as Deputy Director Brandon, about some of the ideas and initiatives that they think can make a difference.
And the good news is that these are not only recommendations that are well within my legal authority and the executive branch, but they're also ones that the overwhelming majority of the American people, including gun owners, support and believe in.
So over the next several days, we'll be rolling out these initiatives.
We'll be making sure that people have a very clear understanding of what can make a difference and what we can do.
And although we have to be very clear that this is not going to solve every violent crime in this country, it's not going to prevent every mass shooting.
It's not going to keep every gun out of the hands of a criminal.
It will potentially save lives in this country and spare families the pain and the extraordinary loss that they've suffered as a consequence of a firearm being in the hands of the wrong people.
I'm also confident that the recommendations that are being made by my team here are ones that are entirely consistent with the Second Amendment and people's lawful right to bear arms.
You know how at the UN they have what they call consecutive interpretation so that while Putin is getting up saying that he will bury us all, you know, there's somebody talking in their ear, they've got a headphone on and somebody is saying, you know, Putin is saying that he deeply respects President Obama and, you know, I would like to translate that into an American as he's talking.
You know, I would like to say, I have no respect for the Constitution or the law or the opinions of the populace, and I will move unilaterally and tyrannically to subvert the Second Amendment and disarm the populace.
I think, let's face it, that's pretty much what he's saying.
And as far as I can tell, he's going to expand background checks, increase federal attention to the laws that are already there.
I think that they're going to expand the right of doctors to report somebody who's mentally ill.
Obviously, that's right for abuse, but basically it's not so bad.
The question is how these things are put into action, if they are abused, if they're misinterpreted, if they take this broad, if the federal government and the bureaus take this broad interpretation, it could be really oppressive.
And of course, everything he just said is untrue.
nobody cares what his Justice Department says is legal because he's completely politicized the Justice Department in a way that would get him tarred and feathered if he were a Republican.
And second of all, it's not in keeping with the opinions of the American people.
The polls show that opposition to gun control has risen and is on the rise and it's now well over 50, I think it's 52% was the last time, the last number I saw, which let's face it, that means that the people under that, there are probably a lot of percentages under that that want just a little bit of control.
I mean, we all want some control over firearms.
You don't want like a guy with an al-Qaeda sweatshirt to go in and buy, you know, I'd like a gun so I can kill Americans.
Yes, here it is.
You know, you don't, you know, we want some laws about gun control.
But so I think that that number is low, but 52% is still, 52% of Americans don't agree about much of anything, and most of them oppose gun control.
So what's he talking about?
All he's doing here, I mean, this is obviously, look, there's a chart in the New York Times, a former newspaper today, about gun sales skyrocketing under Obama.
I think 2 million guns sold, 2 million guns sold in the January after he was re-elected, okay?
2 million, and now it's up to 1.6 million.
I mean, really, I know these people who think that everything that Obama does is intentional.
I mean, to me, Obama is like an old Charlie Chaplin routine where he's tripping over this and tripping over that.
I think that he's done a lot of the things that he intended to do, but I think he thought it was going to make the world a better place.
I think he didn't mean to end the Pax Americana.
He didn't mean to pull America back from the world.
He thought everybody would think, oh, now the American oppression is over, we'll live in peace.
He didn't know that the Middle East was going to go up in flames.
I think he's a hapless schmuck.
He's like a guy who has these ideas, these theories, and because he has a narcissistic personality disorder, when reality disagrees with his theories, when reality shows they don't work, he can't change his mind.
So I think that all these, but all these people say to me, well, America is weaker now.
He must hate America and want it to be weaker.
Or they'll say, well, the Muslims are more powerful.
The Islamist terrorists are more powerful now.
He must secretly be an Islamist.
But the truth is, he's obviously working for the gun industry.
I mean, he has sent gun sales through the roof.
So clearly, before the first Obama election, gun makers got together and said, I know how we're going to get guns.
By the time this president is finished, we're going to have guns in the hands of two-year-olds.
They're going to be four-year-olds toddling down the streets of Waco, shooting at the sky.
This guy is clearly working.
He's clearly working for the NRA.
I mean, it's obviously.
And it's just, it is amazing to me.
It is amazing to me that a man could be so deaf to the people that he's supposed to be governing that he could set us at odds like this.
I mean, what does he think is going to happen?
What does he think this is going to do but cause rage?
And you know what?
I think that is intentional.
I think he despises the people who he's thinking about as having guns.
And I'm talking about white middle-class people.
I think he, you know, listen, the way he talks about people in this country who have been the backbone of this country, who have built this country, who are suffering because their wages have flatlined, are suffering because of the manufacturing jobs.
The way he talks about them is as if they were insects under a microscope that he, the professor, the scientist, is studying.
Listen, just before the end of the year, he gave an interview to government radio, NPR, the voice of your government, Steve Inskeep, he was talking to.
And he was explaining, he was talking about Donald Trump and why people were flocking to Donald Trump and why people were so angry, why this demographic was so angry.
So listen to what he said.
And I do think that when you combine that demographic change with all the economic stresses that people have been going through because of the financial crisis, because of technology, because of globalization,
the fact that wages and incomes have been flatlining for some time and that particularly blue-collar men have had a lot of trouble in this new economy where they're no longer getting the same bargain that they got when they were going to a factory and able to support their families on a single paycheck.
You combine those things and it means that there is going to be potential anger, frustration, fear.
Now, listen to that.
First of all, listen to the language, the bargain they got.
What a great bargain it was for a guy to go and put a lug nut on a car day after day after day so he could put some bread in his children's mouth and keep a roof over his wife's head.
What a great bargain that was for these guys who busted their chops to turn this into the most powerful engine of wealth and democracy and peace on earth.
I mean, this was the greatest generation that he's talking about that have been left out in the cold.
Detroit is a hellhole because of leftist policies.
But just notice this.
He diagnoses this thing like he's a professor giving a lecture about these people.
Not once does he say, and here's what I'm going to do for them.
And here is my solution.
Here's how I'm going to bring manufacturing jobs.
Never mind that.
How about here's how I'm going to train people who've been put out of manufacturing jobs into tech jobs.
This is our plan.
This is the plan that the federal government is producing.
You know, Reagan talked about that.
Reagan didn't say we're going to dismantle the welfare state.
He said, if you are out of work because your job has run out of time, has become outdated, we will train you for the next.
You don't hear a word like that.
It is just a scientist looking at a gnat under a microscope.
And it's so offensive.
And this idea that the demographic has changed.
See, that's the key thing.
It's about race.
And this is what I'm trying to get to.
It's all about race to these guys.
The demographic has changed, so white people are angry.
And he goes on to say, he goes on to say that these are the people, that Trump is exploiting this anger.
This is what Trump is exploiting.
And he's right.
I mean, Drudge had his lead today was a picture of a Trump rally in Lowell, Massachusetts.
And it's thousands of people crowding this rally and hundreds more standing out in the freezing cold waiting to get in to see Donald Trump.
And Obama's right.
Trump is exploiting this rage because this president has told him he despises them.
He despises them.
He despises them for the color of their skin.
He despises them for their history of working for America and doing a job and just being ordinary Americans.
He despises them for all of that.
And this is their way.
And the press despises.
I mean, look, you know, he goes on in this interview, Obama, to talk about how he's been mistreated because he's a black guy, basically.
As far as I'm concerned, because he's a black guy, the media, the news media, have had their lips stuck to his butt as if his butt were a cold piece of metal and they had frozen onto it.
I mean, this guy has been untouchable because, not just because of his leftism, but also because of the color of his skin, because they see everything with race.
And so now what he's saying is, he's saying that it's all about race, really.
It's the demographic changing, and these white guys just can't get on board.
You know, they just can't get on board.
They've been left out in the cold.
I'm not going to do anything about it.
That's just the way it is, because really they're happy.
They think this is a good thing.
Fareed Zakaria did this thing.
There was a piece in the Daily Wire, an excellent piece, calling him out on it.
Fareed Zakaria, the commentator on CNN, wrote a piece in the Washington Post, and he then went on and talked about it on CNN.
And basically he was talking about this study that Angus Deaton did at Princeton.
And if you listen to this podcast, you heard about the study almost before anyone else.
I was one of the first people to pick up on this, that he talks about the fact that white, uneducated, white, middle-class people, their mortality rate is going up.
Everybody else is getting healthier, is living a little bit longer.
Their mortality rate is getting worse.
And it's getting worse because of suicide, because they're taking prescription medicines and some drug use, and it's all kinds of suicidal behavior, and they're killing themselves.
So why is this happening?
So first, Zakaria goes on hilariously, absolutely hilariously, and he calls some sociological chick at Princeton, and she says, well, you know, black people have suffered so much in America that they've developed healthy ways of dealing with adversity.
They have religion, they have art, they have protest speech, you know.
I mean, black people, they don't have destructive behaviors.
They just, you know, they've developed this almost saintly way of dealing with the problems of life.
But white people, they're so used to having it good.
They're so used to going to that factory and having the money.
They're not doing anything, putting a lug nut on it, yeah, the money comes showering down, and they're just used to it all.
So listen to Fareed Zakaria.
Now he's talking about Donald Trump again.
You know, it's all Trump's fault because Trump is voicing, you know, he's doing it cynically, but he is voicing the frustration that people feel.
So listen to Fareed Zakaria gloating over this.
The United States is going through a great power shift.
Working class whites don't think of themselves as an elite group, but in a sense, they have been compared with blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, and most immigrants.
They were central to America's economy, its society, indeed its very identity.
They are the world of the greatest generation.
But the world has changed.
The economy has changed.
America has changed.
Donald Trump is talking to this demographic when he promises that he will take charge and make them win again.
But he can't.
No one can.
And deep down, they know it.
Again, this gloating, you know, absolute do-nothing attitude because he thinks it's a good thing.
He thinks it's just grand that people are poisoning themselves.
And by the way, that's not why they're poisoning.
They're poisoning themselves.
Yes, because some of their jobs have dried up and all this, but also because that sector of the people, the difference between the whites and the blacks is that the whites have this mindset that it's okay to go to the doctor and get these drugs that ultimately kill them.
And that is one of the reasons why they're abusing these drugs, this lack of religion, this lack of a spiritual attitude toward your problems.
Like, I've got to solve my problems by putting my spirit in a better place.
Just take this pill and then you'll be happy and everything will be great.
Force For Good00:11:45
And it does.
It kills you.
But just this voice.
All right, so now these guys are such racists.
Zakaria and Obama, they are such racists.
All they see, they call it the Browning of America.
That's all they see.
And they think that that is the central thing that's going on, which it's not.
Okay, so now we have this land dispute in Oregon.
And basically, you know, it's kind of a complicated situation, but it's basically this.
In places like Oregon, Nevada, Montana, the federal government comes in and they take over land and they declare it to be federal lands and then they use the water rights, their access to water, and they run these ranchers off their lands, basically.
And it's a kind of slow torture and nobody cares.
Nobody covers it.
Nobody pays attention to these guys, their way of life being wiped out for no good reason whatsoever because the federal government says so.
Okay, and there are all these protests about it.
But the federal government, when you've run afoul of the federal government, it's hell.
It is a nightmare.
And they're coming onto your land and saying, you can't have this water and you can't do that.
All right, so there are these ranchers in Oregon, the Hammonds.
And there's Steve and David, is that what it is?
Dwight and Steve, a father and son, Dwight and Steve.
And they're on these lands and they're surrounded, their land and they're surrounded by federal land.
And back in the early 2000s, they did a couple of controlled burns, which is a way that you manage land so you don't have big burns.
And some of the federal lands, about 130, 40 acres, 140 acres of federal land, caught fire.
And the feds claim that they were doing this because they were poaching and they were covering it up.
They claimed that they were doing a controlled burn and it just spread.
In either case, they were arrested.
They were charged with arson.
And arson is, the judge said, the federal government charged them with terrorism, charged them under an anti-terrorist law.
It's amazing.
I mean, it's not like these guys were Bill Ayers, you know, like the weathermen who actually were trying to kill people for political reasons, which is terrorism.
And then, and, of course, Bill Ayers was sentenced to being friends with Obama and starting Obama's, you know, please, no, don't make me be friends with Obama.
No, I'm sorry.
The federal government says you have to be friends with Obama.
But these guys were not terrorists, whatever they were doing, whether they were poaching, you know, they set a fire, the fire spread.
The judge said, I can't, in good conscience, sentence these guys under the terrorism law.
That would mean sending them away for five years.
So he sentenced one of them to three months, one of them to a year.
They got out of prison, and the feds said, no, it's terrorism, and sent them back.
They reported, yes, they sent them back to prison for five years.
Okay.
A protest that had nothing to do with the Hammonds.
The Hammonds were not sponsoring this protest, but a protest of this behavior started.
About 300 people showed up.
A certain number of them, we don't know whether it's 15 or more, went out and with guns, they were militiamen.
They took over an empty federal building on this wildlife preserve, and they basically said, We're staying here to protest this behavior and the stealing of federal lands.
Okay, so that's it.
And these guys, remember, are not connected.
This is this guy, what's his name?
Eamon Bundy.
Remember, in 2014, his father staged a protest against the feds rounding up his cattle, and there was a big protest.
All the militiamen turned up and the feds backed down.
And so far, in this case, by the way, the feds have been acting doing exactly the right thing.
They've been staying away from it, keeping an eye on it, not making it escalate, not getting into this waco idea that there's going to be gunplay and people are going to wind up dead.
They're just kind of waiting it out because basically, if you wait it out, these guys are going to have to go home.
There's nothing they can do ultimately.
All right.
So there's all these people taken out.
And here's Eamon Bundy.
Eamon Bundy was on Megan Kelly last night.
And this was put on YouTube saying Megan Kelly stared Eamon Bundy down.
But what really happened was Bundy, she said, Megan Kelly said to Bundy, look, these guys were convicted under the law.
The process was there.
They followed the law.
It was the rule of law.
Aren't you breaking the rule of law?
And he said to her, Well, who was the plaintiff in this?
You know, who was bringing the complaint?
And I don't think Megan knew, and so she stared him down and said, I don't have to answer questions on my show.
You answer questions.
So ultimately, he answered the question.
And this is his complaint.
It's pretty well stated.
The plaintiff is the federal government.
And yet, they're also, the prosecutors are the federal government.
And those who want their land is the federal government.
And those agencies that have been oppressing the people here are the federal government.
There is no proper redress because the design of this structure of this government is not intended for the federal government to come down against individuals in a state on these matters.
And that is what this is all about.
Okay, now that's a pretty well-stated argument.
You can hear his frustration.
You can hear what he's saying about it.
I'm not saying that he's right to do what he did.
I mean, it's a question of when you use violence, it's always a question.
But let's leave that aside.
The New York Times, as we recall, a former newspaper, right, has a piece today by a woman named Katie Rogers.
It's called What If the Oregon Protesters Were Black or Muslim.
Now, you didn't hear him mention race in this at all, right?
He was mentioning land rights, basically, and he was mentioning federal overstepping its powers.
So let's think about that.
What if they were black or Muslim?
First of all, if they were Muslim, who cares?
If they were Muslim, they'd be fighting for something evil.
They'd be fighting for Sharia law.
They'd be killing people for the caliphate.
Nothing.
You know, these guys are standing up for an American principle.
They may be doing the wrong thing, but they're standing up for something that we all acknowledge is a question of rights.
Who has land rights?
Certainly, the individuals should have property rights.
The state should then be the next authority, and the federal government's only the last authority, and the federal governments have overstepped their balance.
So who cares if they're Muslims?
Who cares if they're Muslims?
The Muslims are doing the wrong thing.
The Islamists are fighting for something evil.
So they should be stopped whether they're violent or not.
As for the blacks, they're talking about Black Lives Matter movement.
Again, I've talked about the fact that blacks have been oppressed in this country, but this Black Lives Matter thing is a manipulated phenomenon.
Cops are not the danger to black people.
Cops are not a danger to black people.
Cops are in there patrolling black neighborhoods, and the white guys who are sitting around sniffing at that aren't in those neighborhoods.
They're not the ones being persecuted by these thugs and criminals.
It's other black people who are being persecuted.
And the cops are of all different races and are trying to protect them.
Sometimes things go wrong.
Sometimes there's a bad cop, but this is not a phenomenon.
The Black Lives Matter, again, is not representing the truth.
These guys are at least talking about the truth, and that doesn't mean that I condone what they did.
But I put on Twitter, I put a tweet saying that when blacks rioted in Baltimore last year because of the Freddie Gray thing, they were poor, abused protesters.
But the Hammonds, not talking about Eamon Bundy, but the Hammonds burned some bushes and they're terrorists.
And Twitter went nuts.
I'm a racist.
I'm an evil guy.
And they're calling, and they're making this a racial thing.
They're calling the people who have taken over the buildings, they're calling them vanilla ISIS, which I thought was pretty funny.
I mean, you gotta hand it to leftists.
They hate America.
They hate liberty.
They hate prosperity.
They hate peace.
But they do get off an occasional funny line.
So there's something to be said for them.
So it's all about race.
It's all about these.
And they have this idea going around that white terrorists, as they call them, have killed more people in America since 9-11 than Islamic terrorists.
And I've looked at this study, and it just takes any crazy white guy with a gun and a grudge, and it calls them a terrorist.
I mean, there is one terrorist threat to America, one terrorist threat to the world, and it's global.
It's global.
It's a theory of religion that is causing people to kill other people.
Those are the terrorists.
Even these guys, again, I'm not condoning what they're doing.
I think they've overstepped their balance, but they have a point.
I understand their frustrations, and they're not terrorists.
They haven't killed anybody.
They've taken over nowhere, by the way.
They're taken over the middle of the forest.
If they leave them alone, they'll finally go home.
All right, what I want to do, I just want to propose for a minute that all of this stuff is untrue.
I want to propose an opposing narrative because I think this narrative has seeped into every conversation, including conversations on the right, all right?
And sometimes the narrative is just simpler than people say it is.
So let me propose a theory, all right?
Here's my theory.
Let's say there is a force for good.
Let's call it Sam, the force for good, okay?
It tries to get people to do things that are good.
A mother raising the next generation, teaching them love and morals and good principles and making them feel secure is working as a force for good.
Someone feeding the poor, someone building a business and giving people what they want and creating wealth for himself and the community.
These are people working in the forces for good.
Now, let's say there is also a force for, let's call it evil, okay?
Let's put a name on it.
We'll call it Mel, the force for evil, okay?
And what Mel wants is Mel doesn't care what you think.
He doesn't care as long as you're doing the wrong thing, okay?
As long as you're hurting people, as long as you're hating people, he mel doesn't care.
Mel, the force for evil, doesn't care.
You know, and what he does is he uses evil to create more evil.
Let's say an evil is racism, you know.
I mean, I talk about this a lot because I hear people talking about genetics, racial genetics.
And I always wonder, well, where'd you get your PhD in genetics?
Because genetics is a very, very complex and nascent science.
It's just beginning.
They don't know that much about it.
They don't know how long.
You know, there was a study recently that maybe the behavior of a father could affect his semen and thereby affect the genes of the baby who gets born.
They just don't know that much, okay?
And you know even less, and I know even less than the people who do know stuff, okay?
So it's entirely possible that if you could raise a Jewish kid in a test tube and a black kid in a test tube, it's possible, I don't think it's true, but it's possible that the Jewish kid is more likely to be a doctor and the black kid is still more likely to be a jazz musician.
I don't know that that's possible, but who needs a doctor in a world without jazz?
Who needs to be healthy if there's no jazz?
It doesn't matter, you know.
So all that, but racism is the idea that there is a moral difference between these two.
And that is an offense to everything we know to be true.
It's an offense to the order to love your neighbor, and it's an offense to the idea that we are made in the image of God.
It's just absurd, okay?
So let's say Mel, the force for evil, just wants to create that feeling.
The thing about racism is it creates racism.
It creates racism in the victims of racism.
Mel, the force for evil, doesn't care who's racist.
He doesn't care if white people are tormenting black people.
He doesn't care if black people are hating on white people.
It doesn't matter to Mel the Force for Evil.
So the only way out of this is through an act of human grace, is to say, you know, yeah, black people were mistreated in this country.
They were.
There's no question about it.
Not by me.
Not by me.
There's nothing I can do about it.
I was given a soul of my own and a life of my own.
I use it the best way I can.
If I offend somebody by doing something wrong, you can let me know about it.
But otherwise, leave me the hell alone.
And I will leave you the hell alone.
And I will not look at the color of your skin.
What then?
What happens then if we look at the problems facing America?
If we look at these people dying of drug abuse in the middle of the country, wouldn't Obama be obligated to help them?
Wouldn't he be obligated not to talk about them as if they were bugs?
Wouldn't it be good if he wasn't gloating about them?
Because it doesn't matter what color they are.
What if the person who gets shot in a slum, in a ghetto, what if we don't care what color he is?
What if we just ask what he did and what the policeman did?
What if we just absolutely got rid of this narrative and got rid of this narrative?
What would the country look like then?
Mark Stein Writes About Culture00:02:59
And I will leave, I'll leave you with that country.
With that question, what would the country look like then?
Because I think these guys are lying to us every time they open their mouth about this subject.
I don't think this is the issue we're facing.
I think we're facing a much different issue.
It's an issue that has to do with liberty, an issue that has to do with right and wrong, and has absolutely nothing to do with the color of people's skin.
I'm done.
I'm going to talk now about stuff I like.
My favorite part of the show.
I have to tell this quick story.
I know we've kind of gone a little long, but tell this quick story.
I lived in England during the 90s.
And while I was living there, of course, I'm always following the culture and I'm reading a newspaper.
I guess it was The Telegraph.
And I'm reading the TV reviews.
TV reviews are the dullest, stupidest thing.
You know, because who cares what you think about some game show that's on television?
And I'm reading this TV review and I said to my wife, this guy is one of the best writers I've ever read.
This guy writing this TV review is fantastic.
I can't believe he's wasting his life writing about game shows and things like this.
And they had a little picture of him, you know, his name.
One day I'm walking out in Knightsbridge and I see him on the street.
And I think, there's that crazy guy who writes so well, but he's writing about TV.
There's Mark Stein.
And I thought, you know, at this point, I'm a major best-selling author.
And I think if I walk up to this guy who's, to me as a kid, right, I walk up to him and say, son, you are wasting your time.
You are a talented person.
You should be writing about important things.
But I'm too shy, and I just couldn't bring myself to do it.
And so I let him walk away.
And of course, 10 years later, I look and there's, I think, oh my gosh, there's Mark Stein, and he's writing about important stuff.
He's writing about politics, and he's writing about the death of the West and all this stuff.
However, however, before he did that, you know, I said earlier that I wanted to do this week talk about musicals.
And one of the things that lovely Lindsay reminded me about is that most of the best musicals are plays, and they weren't made into movies, or they weren't always made into good movies or great movies.
And there's no point in recommending plays because you just don't know what's playing in your area, what's playing in your theater.
Sometimes they come around and traveling shows and all this stuff, but there's no point in writing.
Mark Stein, before he started writing politically, wrote a book that is so good about musicals.
It's called Broadway Babies Say Goodnight.
And it is one of the most entertaining, most skillful.
And you know what?
It's Stein writing about what he really cares about.
And when I met Mark Stein, I said to him, you know, I was wrong.
I shouldn't have come up to you and said, write about important stuff.
I should have said, write about the culture, but write about better culture, because when he wrote about this, when he wrote about Broadway musicals, this book is so amazingly entertaining.
So when you go on Amazon today to buy my new book, Game Over, okay, stop off and also order a copy of Broadway Babies Say Good Night by Mark Stein.
It's a great book about musicals.
It really is.
It's like eating a piece of cake.
And speaking of pieces of cake, the show is over already.
It just seems like it just started.
But I'll be back again tomorrow and I will say more things.
And they will be even as interesting as the things I said today.